The Top Free Online University Courses of 2018, Ranked by Popularity

Free online courses -- also called Massive Open Online Courses -- have quite a year. An anonymous reader shares a blog post: It's been seven years since these courses rose to prominence, when a few Stanford professors decided to offer their courses online free. Since then over over 900 universities have launched over 11,000 courses. And in its seven years these Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) have achieved new milestone: 100 million plus learners. [...] At the end of every year, I do an extensive analysis of the MOOC space. To help me with analysis, I send the top MOOC providers a set of questions, one of them being the top enrolled courses of 2018.

The list below contains the top enrolled courses from the major MOOC providers: Coursera, edX, Udacity, and FutureLearn. Combined, these providers represent a big chunk of the MOOC learners (70 million plus). Without further ado, here are the most popular free online university courses of 2018:
Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects from University of California, San Diego.
Machine Learning from Stanford University.
The Science of Well-Being from Yale University.
Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
CS50's Introduction to Computer Science from Harvard University.

Disappointing...

[b0s0z0ku]

Disappointing that basic science and maths courses don't even make the top 30 or so...

Agreed

[DogDude]

The idea of the Internet democratizing information sadly, hasn't happened (yet?). So far, the Internet is largely used for porn and cat pics and other stupid garbage. As someone who's used the Net from before there was a Web, it's severely disappointing.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[vtcodger]

There are so many sources of free tutorial material on the Internet, that I'm not sure lists of the most popular courses are all that meaningful. For example, the Feynman Physics Lectures are available at http://www.feynmanlectures.cal... [caltech.edu]. That's years worth of study material. It may just be an issue of not looking in the right place for basic science and math courses

Re: Disappointing...

[TJHook3r]

Khan Academy has discrete subjects that can be taken together as a learning path - no certificates at the end but the tutorials are excellent.

Wrong...

[110010001000]

The top one is "Host Files: What they do and how to Maintain Them".

The Evil Empire

[Ashthon]

Positive proof that Microsoft is pure evil:

Learn to Program in Java from Microsoft
Introduction to Python: Absolute Beginner from Microsoft

Java?! Python?! It's one thing to engage in anticompetitive business practices, but now they're trying to distort people's minds and ruin their lives!

Don't even get me started on:

Introduction to Data Analysis using Excel from Microsoft
Analyzing and Visualizing Data with Excel from Microsoft

That's just sick!

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

The Analyzing and Visualizing Data one is mostly about power pivot and the new data model. The concepts carry over well to Tableau, Qlik or probably any other Business Intelligence Software of that type.

And it's completely free.

Text-based online classes

[myid]

I've taken online programming classes that were text-based (you read the lessons), and classes that were video-based (you watch a video of the teacher giving the lecture).

I much prefer text-based classes.

- You don't have to take notes,

- there's no misunderstanding of what the teacher said (misunderstanding the spoken word),

- you can do a search on a word (ex: inherit) to find and read what the teacher said about that subject,

- you can easily go back and re-read a paragraph that you didn't understand,

- the sample code is embedded right there in the lesson, and

- there's much less bandwidth with text than with video.

I've only found two schools that offer text-based online classes that aren't super expensive: https://www.freecodecamp.org/ [freecodecamp.org] and https://ed2go.com/ [ed2go.com]. (ed2go is cheap but not free.) Unfortunately, neither of these schools teaches more advanced stuff like Java Servlets.

ed2go is mostly text-based, but if necessary, they supply a video. For example, I took an ed2go class in Photoshop. The lessons contained text and images, but they also contained short videos. "Click here, then click there. See how the color changes from blue to red." Those short videos really helped.

Does anyone know of any other school that offers online classes that are text-based (not video-based)?

Re: You know what would be actually useful?

[TJHook3r]

There are completion stats somewhere... I recall that MOOCs have a tiny completion rate generally but that probably means the objective is to get somewhat better at a subject or study a specific part, rather than obtain a degree level of understanding.

Re:

[hraponssi]

That would be both useful and and interesting. I started on the Stanford ML course a few times but never found the motivation to finish it, with the focus on all the details I would rather have the tools and libraries take care of for me, and focus on the applications. I would expect many to be similarly interested and have a look, especially in case of free courses..

Who invented MOOCs?

[VeryFluffyBunny]

Stanford University didn't invent MOOCs or even Open Educational Resources (OER).

AFAIK, the first time a course was offered as a MOOC was at the University of Manitoba in Canada, in 2008, called Connectivism and Connective Knowledge. It lasted 32 weeks & was a loosely organised network of students kept informed of the course materials & each others' contributions via an RSS aggregator. As they stand, currently popular MOOCs are no better than buying a well-written book on a given subject. I've revie